Sonallah Ibrahim: Egypt’s Oracular Novelist

In May of 2011, three months after the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime, the Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim, a wiry man in his mid-seventies with a salt-and-pepper half-fro, was interviewed about the relationship between politics and literature. Asked if he was writing anything about the uprising, Ibrahim demurred. To write about Tahrir would require a great deal of research. “A novel takes time,” he explained, and a good novel “would have to have a firm grasp of the past, the present moment, and the future—what will happen, or what might happen afterwards. All this entails having a total vision.”

Ibrahim has written a number of historical novels set in times of profound historical transformation. “Warda” (2000) tells the story of a female guerilla who fights for the Dhofar Rebellion, in Oman, in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. “Turbans et Chapeaux” (2008) is a revisionary account of Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt, which is commonly thought to have ushered Egypt into modern history. In the interview, Ibrahim suggested that what had happened in Tahrir was not on this order of magnitude. “It certainly was not a revolution,” he said. “A revolution has a program and a goal—a complete change of reality or the removal of one class by another. What happened was a popular uprising [whose] primary demand was ‘regime change,’ though it was not clear what that was supposed to mean, except in the sense of removing the most prominent symbols of the old regime.”

Ibrahim has become a sort of oracle for many Egyptian students and writers, although he is not as outspoken or as friendly to journalists as his fellow novelist and leftist Alaa Al Aswany. Along with his fiction, Ibrahim is revered for having publicly refused the Arab Novel Award, a prize given by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, under Mubarak. In 2003, Ibrahim attended the awards ceremony, but instead of delivering an acceptance speech he excoriated the regime for its feckless foreign policy, its endemic corruption, and its use of torture, all of which, he said, gave him no choice but to refuse the prize: “For it was awarded by a government that, in my opinion, lacks the credibility to bestow it.” At that time, Ibrahim was already well known as a dissenter. He had belonged to the Communist Party as a young man, and his novels of the eighties and nineties—published by independent rather than state-funded presses—were pitiless satires of Mubarak-era Egypt. He also has a reputation for personal probity, living modestly in a sixth-floor walk-up in a middle-class suburb of Cairo. The awards-ceremony speech made him a hero, especially among young Egyptian writers.

And yet, in the months after the fall of Mubarak, his admiration for what the protestors in Tahrir had accomplished was mixed with doubts. His sense that the uprising was that it was not quite a revolution, and his preference for the long, historical view seemed out of step with the enthusiasm of the crowds. By the summer of that year, with Field Marshal Tantawi and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces firmly in control and the protestors still leaderless and politically incoherent, Ibrahim’s position seemed closer to wisdom. Now, after eighteen months of rule by the Brotherhood, with a counterrevolution in full swing, his words seem almost prophetic.

This is not the first time that Ibrahim’s skepticism has made him look like a soothsayer. His first book, “That Smell,” which I recently translated to English, was originally published in Cairo, in 1966. The novel is narrated by a political prisoner whose return to civilian life provokes a sense of terrible alienation. A dozen years after Gamal Abdel Nasser’s assumption of power, in 1952 (here, too, the question of whether to call it a coup or a revolution is unsettled), political life in Egypt has flatlined. Nasser was without a doubt the most popular political figure in the Middle East. He had faced down Western imperialism at Suez, in 1956, nationalized the canal, and become the leading spokesman for Pan-Arabism and anti-Zionism, with enthusiastic supporters from Morocco to Iraq. He was also a brilliant orator who could shift from sly, colloquial humor to inspiring rhetoric without a break in delivery.

But Ibrahim’s novel suggested that Nasser’s charismatic spell was fading. The narrator’s status as a political prisoner—only obliquely referenced in the novel—implied that the regime’s popularity was partly dependent on its repression of dissent. In the novel, most characters are no longer interested in politics. The narrator’s friends talk of nothing but film stars and the latest appliances from Beirut. Soldiers returning from the front in Yemen, where Nasser had sent them to bolster Republican forces in the civil war, are ignored, and state bureaucrats fiddle while Cairo drowns in sewage. A year after the novel’s publication, Nasser’s Army was humiliated and Israel controlled the Sinai. The defeat was complete and for most Egyptians, who had grown used to broadcasts of Nasser’s rhetorical victories over the Zionists, utterly unforeseen. In retrospect, Ibrahim’s skepticism about the achievements of the military regime was seen as a harbinger of its collapse.

How can we explain the novel’s diagnostic powers? What is remarkable about “That Smell,” beyond its superbly austere style, is its economy. The book is very short, but it conjures up an entire city and then sets it in motion. For most of the novel, we follow the narrator as he travels through the Egyptian capitol, walking or taking trams, buses, taxis, and subways. He visits friends and family, who represent the spectrum of lower- and middle-class Cairo: underpaid bureaucrats, sulky, pro-American bourgeoisie, religious entrepreneurs (“one prayer at al-Aqsa Mosque [is] worth a thousand piety points,” a relative tells the narrator), self-important military officers, idle journalists, policemen, and prisoners. There is virtually no commentary—the narrator is a kind of traumatized witness to the action—and yet the relations between characters are exactingly clear. It is a comédie humaine of Nasserist Egypt in just fifty pages, a powerful example of the “total vision” that Ibrahim claims is necessary for any fiction that takes history seriously.

This vision is not the fruit of inspiration but, rather, of careful research. Ibrahim’s fictions are full of real or invented documents. They stick out of the surrounding text like exposed structural beams, as if he were purposefully drawing our attention to the archival labor involved in writing. In the case of “That Smell,” we actually have Ibrahim’s working papers, though they come in the unusual form of a prison diary. Like the narrator of the novel, Ibrahim spent five years in prison, from 1959 to 1964, along with many other Egyptian Communists (an apparently pro-Communist coup in Iraq at the end of 1958 had made Nasser suspicious of his domestic Reds, and he rounded up the entire Party on New Year’s Day, 1959). It was in the southern desert, close to the border with Sudan, that he read Virginia Woolf, György Lukács, and the nouveau roman. He took extensive notes about his readings, as well as on some aspects of daily life in prison. He eventually transferred these notes to cigarette papers and smuggled them out; they make clear his ambitions for his first novel. “Must write about Cairo after studying her neighborhood by neighborhood, her classes, her evolution,” he writes. “The great, enormous city from every angle, its birthing pains.” Elsewhere, he identifies the impasse that Nasserism had run into and tried to imagine a way out: “The romanticism of struggle is over. What remains are the utterly naked facts. The cult of personality and its collapse. Rethinking of everything.”

In the present context, what is strikingly absent from Ibrahim’s notebooks is any mention of the Muslim Brotherhood. Throughout the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the Ikhwan and the Communists shared the same prisons and suffered the same tortures. The Egyptian Communist Party was never large, but it attracted a number of intellectuals and was an ideological rival to the regime. The Brotherhood was a more dangerous foe, if only because its size. In the same years that Ibrahim was taking notes for his novel, Sayyid Qutb, the Brotherhood’s most virulent theologian, was finishing his thirty-volume commentary on the Koran. For both groups, Nasser’s jails were their schools. But the only reference to the Islamists in Ibrahim’s diaries comes in a footnote, written when the notes were published, in 2006. There, he notes how the Communist prisoners, in accordance with their political ideals, pooled everything they had—books, cigarettes, food—while among Brotherhood prisoners the luckier inmates “tithed” their possessions to the less fortunate. Ibrahim sees this behavior as symptomatic of a deeper greediness. In his novels, Islamists are consistently depicted as capitalists with prayer beads. And in an interview seven months into Mohamed Morsi’s Presidency, he noted that the Brotherhood’s economic policies “did not differ at all from those of Wall Street.” Many Egyptian leftists have made the same criticism (which is largely justified). The two groups share a history of repression and imprisonment, but otherwise have little to say to one another.

Egypt’s military governments have done their best to aggravate this mutual suspicion. While Nasser jailed both Communists and Islamists, the regime of Anwar Sadat used Brotherhood cadres to root leftists out of the universities (one of the many policies that endeared him to American Cold Warriors). By the end of the seventies, little remained of the organized Egyptian left. The Brotherhood, meanwhile, was alternately suffered to exist and then violently suppressed—a game of cat-and-mouse that was played in part to solicit American aid for the Egyptian military. The results of these policies are still being felt. One reason why the Tahrir protestors have struggled to articulate a shared political program is that secularists and leftists have no continuous tradition of political activity. The Communist Party had voted to dissolve itself in 1965 and join Nasser’s Arab Socialist Union; other leftist parties had been similarly co-opted by the state (hence the somewhat oracular status of those few intellectuals, like Ibrahim, who have remained loyal to their ideals.) In the same way, the Muslim Brotherhood’s style of governance during its brief stint in power was marked by its history as a clandestine group: it was conspiratorial, unable or unwilling to explain itself to outsiders, and utterly deaf to the wishes of the broader populace.

The détente between the Army and the Islamists has fallen apart in spectacular fashion, and the generals now seem willing to give others a chance at governing, albeit on the Army’s timetable. Some “liberals” have leapt at the opportunity. Others, more principled, have condemned both the Brotherhood, for its policies while in power, and the Army, for its massacres. It is worth noting the one alliance that has so far not been attempted is one between the Islamist and leftist-liberal opposition, which organized the original protests in Tahrir. These are the two genuinely popular forces in Egypt. Such a provisional coalition obviously could not be made at the level of policy, where the differences are irreconcilable, but it is at least imaginable based on a shared desire to send the Army back to barracks.

At the end of the interview he gave during the spring of the Arab Spring, Ibrahim recalled Marx’s idea, taken from Hegel, of “the negation of the negation,” according to which “any situation is composed of contradictory elements [whose struggle] sets in motion a transition to a new, different situation which is itself the result of one of the opposing sides beating out the other.” He then cautioned against the belief that any side would be able to claim ultimate victory:

Suppose that elections happen and we get a Parliament that represents the various political tendencies that exist in the country. Suppose a new president gets elected during this process. I could not say that this would represent a victory for us. Given the nature of human life, and given how historical contradictions develop, this victory will create other contradictions of other kinds within five or ten years. These will give rise to other struggles, revolutions of another sort, and so on.

At the moment, there are no signs of a front between Islamists and secularists. History shows how deep and well founded the animosity between these groups is. Days before the recent Army takeover, Ibrahim was one of the many intellectuals who participated in sit-ins at the Ministry of Culture to protest the Brotherhood’s policies. And right now, no one in Egypt is more popular than General el-Sisi, despite, or perhaps because of, his ruthlessness. But it is not clear whether Egyptians will agree to live once more under military rule. It wasn’t long ago that they hung effigies of Field Marshal Tantawi in Tahrir Square. The present negation will almost certainly be negated in turn. Egypt’s revolution, if that’s what it is, may have more surprises in store.

Robyn Creswell is poetry editor of The Paris Review and Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University.

Top: A mass demonstration in the Ramses district of Cairo on August 16, 2013. Photograph by Moises Saman/Magnum. Above: Sonallah Ibrahim in France, in 1999. Photograph by Frederic Reglain/Gamma-Rapho/Getty.